it wasn’t at first but I suspect they received a ton of feedback and fixed it.
in my estimation the robo driver has reached a median-human level of driving skill. it still doesn’t quite know how to balance the weight of the car through turns and it sometimes gets fussy with holding lanes at night but otherwise it mimics human behaviors pretty well except where they’re illegal like rolling through the first stop at a stop sign.
Now I’m imagining the Waymo Driver calling out to Gemini to determine "school hours" by looking it up on the Internet, and wondering about the nature of life.
The answer is encoded in the map data in this case, but it's an interesting category of problems for autonomous vehicles.